


Old Saint Nick

by fourshoesfrank



Category: Klaus (2019)
Genre: Autistic Klaus (Klaus 2019), Dysphoria, F/M, Gen, Internalized Transphobia, Period-Typical Ableism, Period-Typical Transphobia, SO HELP ME THOSE TAGS WILL HAPPEN, Trans Klaus (Klaus 2019), deadnaming, ill fix that when i get my hands on a fucntioning computer, the italics arent working for me....
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21515983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank
Summary: She calls him Nick.
Relationships: Klaus/Lydia
Comments: 12
Kudos: 100





	Old Saint Nick

**Author's Note:**

> question: what time period is this? answer: yes this is a time. it’s a period. iit’s in the General Fantasy Past babey!! don’t worry about it. don’t overthink the geography either; i’ve already done that and i know it’s totally bizarre 
> 
> enjoy!

When he was born, he was Nicole Klaus. His parents called him Nicole, and they raised him like a Nicole would be raised. He spent his childhood at his mother’s side, watching her sew and cook and give birth to his younger siblings. While he watched, he stored all this new knowledge away so he could use it when he grew up and got married. 

He was five years old when merely watching his mother became unacceptable. He was supposed to talk to her, learn from her. He couldn’t do that. 

  
His younger siblings had outstripped him in the act of talking years ago. His two-year-old sister was still supposed to only be watching, but she was already making little words and saying the words to their mother. He couldn’t do much more than that, and he was five! Talking made his tongue feel uncomfortable in his mouth, like it was made of wood and attached to a throat made of stone. At times, he found that he could talk because his tongue had turned back into muscle, but those times were few and far between. 

  
Eventually, he appeared to grow out of it. He didn’t actually stop feeling like his tongue had turned to wood, he just got better at hiding it. Still, he wasn’t good enough at talking for his family to consider employing him in the family business, which was a bakery. Instead, he was sent off to learn the craft of woodcutting in his uncle’s village, hidden away in the thick forests of northwestern Europe. 

  
He knew that his family didn’t really mean to push him aside like that, but they had. They had waited until he was eleven years old, decided that he didn’t have what it took to fit in with the family, and shunted him off to be forgotten in the woods within the next five years. 

  
They sent him on his way with a sack full of food, a week’s wages, and a spare cloak. He traveled with his aunt for a day until they reached the main road that would lead him to the forest. His aunt kissed him on the cheek and told Nicole to make the family proud. 

  
The problem was that he didn’t want to make the family proud. He didn’t want—Nicole didn’t want—to be the prodigal mute daughter, sent off into the woods only to return years later with a skill and a voice. He just wanted a quiet place to live, with no relatives hanging over his shoulder tracking to figure out what was wrong with him. 

  
He also didn’t want to be called Nicole. Nicole was the name of a failure of a child, a stupid, mute little girl who could read most of the Bible but couldn’t thread a needle in a straight line to save her life. Nicole was left behind in his parents’ home. 

  
He wasn’t sure if he even wanted to have a name. Names were just ways that people gained power over others. There was a reason that giving your name to one of the Fair Folk was a bad idea, something children were cautioned against almost from birth. 

  
He hadn’t been the recipient of too many anti-Fair Folk lectures, though, at least not compared to his siblings. His parents had given him the customary warning and called it done. He’d even overheard them pondering whether he was actually one of the Fair Folk; might he be a changeling, planted in their family to replace a human child stolen by the hill-folk? 

  
He didn’t want to have a given name, nor was he particularly enthused about his family name. Klaus was the name of the family that wanted to get rid of him. 

  
He made the decision that night—he wasn’t going to keep the name Nicole. He would think of a better name on the way to his uncle. He would keep the name Klaus, if only in order to be easily recognized by the people of his uncle’s village. 

  
It came to him the next day, on the road: why not become a boy? He was no good at women’s things anyway, and he was on his way to the home of a woodcutter, so why was he even bothering to be a girl? He’d always known that something was wrong with the way his family treated him, besides the fact that they ignored him and called him a changeling. They treated him like a girl, and he hated it. 

  
He was Klaus, a useless boy from Brandenburg, and he was going to live with his uncle. He rehearsed this over and over to himself until there was no chance of forgetting any part of his story. He was Klaus, a useless half-mute boy from Brandenburg, and he was going to live with his uncle. 

His uncle had no idea he was coming, so Klaus decided not to tell him about Nicole. He was just going to be Klaus, the weird nephew. He looked boyish enough that a lie of omission would work, at least until he approached adolescence. He would worry about that when it happened, not before. 

  
His uncle was overjoyed to have his ‘nephew’ come to live with him. The forest village wasn’t the small, backwards place that Klaus had thought it would be. Most of the people lived relatively happy lives, and they were, for the most part, fairly accepting of the newcomer. It helped that Klaus’ uncle was well-liked, so his nephew was regarded with the same fondness. Klaus hoped that someday he could do something to repay the villagers for their (mostly) unquestioning friendship. 

  
There was a small manor near the village, just on the outskirts of the forest. The manor lord was a minor noble, just important enough to boss his subjects around but not important or rich enough to have any real power in the grand scheme of things. The lord employed servants, but he had no fighting forces and the town that had sprung up around the manor was pitifully small. It was barely larger than the forest village. 

  
On a good day, the manor was a three hour walk from the village, and the town was a two-and-a-half hour walk. Klaus made the trip often, laden with bags full of wooden implements and a smattering of novelty items to sell in the town’s market place. He wasn’t the best salesman, mostly because his tongue seemed determined to work against him by turning to wood in his mouth halfway through every transaction, but Klaus managed to make a decent amount of money. Well, his uncle made a decent amount of money. Klaus merely obtained the money for him. 

  
He sold wooden tools to farmers, carpenters, butchers, priests; everyone knew that Klaus’ uncle was the best woodcutter for miles around. Klaus also sold special carved items to anyone who was interested. He carved and painted most of these himself, because his uncle didn’t yet trust him to make tools that lived up to the customers’ expectations. 

  
He was sixteen years old selling his uncle’s wares in the market when he saw her. Her. She was so beautiful. She was buying some meat from the butcher’s stall across the market place from Klaus’ location, accompanied by a scowling man who had to be her father. The man looked like a farmer, with a face hard and gnarled and weathered from a lifetime of work and a body to match. 

  
The girl, though... She didn’t look like her father. She looked like a farmer’s daughter, to be sure; she was strong and tough-looking, but she also seemed gentle. Klaus didn’t feel the sense of dread that usually came over him when a customer approached his cart. Talking to this girl didn’t scare him. 

  
The girl didn’t handle the transaction. Her father did. Klaus’ throat immediately closed up in fear when the stringy man approached him with his money bag in hand, eyeing the tools laid out in the back of the cart like they were rejects he could snatch up without paying. Klaus tried desperately to catch the girl’s eye, in the hope that she could somehow fix this. Her father scared Klaus. He didn’t know exactly why, but he did. 

  
“How much for the rake, lad?” the farmer asked, pointing to a short rake made of maple wood that lay in the very back of the cart. 

  
Klaus opened his mouth to reply. He wanted to say Sir, the rake is ten pennies, but his mouth wouldn’t let him. Instead, he mumbled, “Ten,” in a voice so quiet it could have been mistaken for the wind. The farmer chuckled and fumbled out ten pennies to exchange for the rake. Klaus stares at the outstretched hand for a moment before his mind caught up to his body. Moving jerkily, like a marionette, he grabbed the coins, put them in his own money bag, and handed over the rake. As the farmer and his daughter walked away from the cart, Klaus heard the father talking about him. 

  
“Don’t know how skilled men like that boy’s uncle can be stupid enough to send oafs like him to the market. You heard that voice, didn’t you, Lydia? Almost mute. I’ll be shocked if he ever gets married. Wouldn’t want to bring him into our family, would you? Ha!”

  
The girl—Lydia—sighed. “Father, he didn’t do anything bad. Leave him be,” she said, and the knot in Klaus’ throat lessened. Lydia was a rare kind of person. Almost everyone who knew Klaus, even the villagers who liked him, thought he was simple, just a mostly-mute boy with an unusual talent for woodcutting. 

  
Klaus didn’t see Lydia again for two months. Their next meeting (or their first, depending on the exact definition of ‘meeting’) took place during a harvest festival in the town square. The festival was very colorful, very loud, and very smelly; Klaus couldn’t make himself calm down enough to enjoy it. He was taking in so many things at once and his brain couldn’t work fast enough to sort everything into sight smell sound taste touch sight smell sight taste sound touch touch sight smell. Everything blended into everything else. 

  
He wandered out of the square and walked to the market place, the one area of the town that he knew well. Familiar surroundings helped calm him, but not completely. He was still on edge. 

  
“Are you alright?”

  
Klaus jumped. Something had just happened, but he wasn’t sure what. He had to sort it out first. 

  
He was aware of the change even though nothing looked different. The change was not in front of him. He couldn’t make out any individual smell, so nothing was burning or producing any other alarming odor... probably. He wasn’t eating, so taste was out; and no one was touching him. He was sure of that. That left hearing. Someone had said something to him. 

  
He turned around and saw Lydia standing behind him, dressed in her finest clothing and holding a red candle, probably taken from her home and lit at the festival bonfire. Klaus focused on the candle, focused on how its small flame danced in the autumn night breeze. It was easier to look at the candle than to look at her eyes. 

  
He knew that she had said something to him, but frankly, he didn’t care. He just wanted to be away from all the festivities, and that included the people participating in them. 

  
“Klaus, what’s wrong?”

  
She wanted to know what was bothering him. Okay, Klaus could answer that. He could make his tongue move just enough for one word, for Lydia. He could do it. 

  
“Party.” His voice is quiet again, but not the same way it was when he sold that rake to her father. This time, his voice is rough, quiet the way the footsteps of a bear were quiet. There was something lurking in his chest, and if he wasn’t careful, the thing would latch onto his voice and escape into the rest of his body, and he could hurt Lydia if that happened. 

  
He didn’t want that to happen. 

  
“The preacher is about to give his sermon,” she said, glancing back towards the festival as she did so. “I don’t really want to listen to him. Can I sit with you?”

  
How could Klaus refuse her? They sat in the market place for the rest of the evening, entertaining themselves quietly; sometimes alone, sometimes together. Mostly together, by the time the night ended. 

  
Klaus and Lydia spent every available second together. She visited him in his uncle’s woodshop, and he took a detour to visit her father’s farm whenever he could spare the time. He usually ended up running home through the forest just as dusk was falling, but that was alright. His uncle didn’t care. 

  
As Klaus grew older, it became harder and harder for him to disguise the secret of his sex. He wore several layers of clothing to compensate for his budding breasts, drank special teas purchased in a far-off village in order to prevent himself from menstruating, and he practiced deepening his voice whenever he was alone on his walk to or from the town. When layers stopped working to hide his breasts, he started tying them down with a long strip of leather that he bought in the market. He said it was to be made into a cushion cover when the tanner asked what he wanted with a piece of leather that large. 

  
As hard as Klaus tried to hide all evidence of his sex, Lydia found out. She saw him bathing in a stream and she found out that he was wrong, bad, disgusting, deformed—

  
“Beautiful.”

  
Klaus wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. Beautiful?

  
“What?” he asked, digging around in his ear for any wax that was disrupting his hearing. There was no way she had just called him beautiful. 

  
“I said you’re beau-ti-ful, Klaus.” Well, she was exaggerating the word, which obviously meant she was joking... Right? 

  
“I’m not,” Klaus said. He got out of the stream and began to put his clothes back on, with the intention of taking the walk of shame back to his village alone, unaccompanied by Lydia. She would not go with him because she knew he was a fraud, a poser, a phony, a hypocrite—

  
“I don’t think you’re a woman,” Lydia announced to the wood. She stepped forward and placed a hand on Klaus’ bare shoulder. “You’re a man. If that’s what you’re worried about, please don’t. I know that you are not a woman.”

  
“Look at me,” Klaus retorted, not knowing why he was attacking himself but at the same time unable to refrain from doing so. “I have breasts, like you; I have no penis, like you; my hips are curved, like yours; I even have the same kind of neck that you have. I wish...” He trailed off, feeling his tongue turn to dead weight in his mouth before he could squeeze all the words out. This hardly ever happened around Lydia. Klaus shook his head in frustration. This was humiliating. 

  
“What’s your name?”

  
Ah. This, he could answer. “Klaus,” he mumbled. 

  
“No, your first name.”

  
Nicole. He couldn’t say that; it would give her too much information. Klaus didn’t want Lydia to know anything about his childhood. In his opinion, those years were better off forgotten, rotting away in the back corner of his mind alongside the name Nicole Klaus. 

  
“Klaus,” he repeated. “Klaus.” That was his name, not Nicole. 

  
“No, what name did your parents call you?”

  
Oh, for the love of—

  
“Nicole,” he whispered. His heart sped up in his chest at the sound of that forbidden name. Klaus hadn’t thought it was possible for his chest to get any more uncomfortable, but it did. He waited for Lydia’s reaction. He dreaded hearing the next words out of her mouth. 

  
Her mouth twitched into a smile. “Can I call you Nicholas?” she asked him. 

  
What?

  
"Nicholas?” Klaus echoed, not quite believing what he’d heard. She wasn’t going to taunt him? Nicole wasn’t going to be weaponized against him?

  
“Or I could call you Nick, if you like short names,” she offered. 

  
“Nick.” It was a good name, just like Nicholas, unlike Nicole. 

  
A piece of wood that had nicks in it seemed useless to an amateur, but an expert woodcutter would have no problem turning it into a masterpiece. 

**Author's Note:**

> again about the geography: i like to think they moved to Scandinavia after they got married to just get as far away as possible. i know Brandenburg/Prussia isnt part of Scandinavia dont worry lol
> 
> edit: so when i wrote this we were studying this region of europe in my ap euro class and of course that bled into my writing......
> 
> anyway! thanks for reading!! please leave a comment, or a kudos, or both))


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